The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

I do get recognized, but I must say Edinburgh is a fantastic city to live if you're well-known. There is an innate respect for privacy in Edinburgh people, and I also think they're used to seeing me walking around, so I don't think I'm a very big deal.

Death is just life's next big adventure.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I think it does really, I'm just a little more out about it.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?

I received free health care.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

I think you're working and learning until you die.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.